A main source of revenue for national television broadcasters and their local broadcast affiliates is the sale of broadcast airtime to advertisers that want to promote their goods and/or services. Similarly, cable network and IPTV providers derive income from the sale of advertising time and subscription fees. Advertisers want their advertisements (ads) to be shown to those viewers that are likely to be interested in their products and/or services. One common technique is to target viewers according to a particular type of television programming. For example, an advertiser may determine that men who watch sports are more likely to purchase a pickup or sport utility vehicle rather than another type of automobile. Accordingly, the advertiser may then purchase ad space during a broadcast of a football game. Another common technique to target viewers is according to geographic area. For example, viewers in one local or regional area may likely be more interested in goods and/or services from a particular advertiser than viewers in a different area.
“Local ad insertion” is a business practice used by television affiliates, re-broadcasters, and service providers to sell advertising airtime for a limited geographical area. Local ad insertion was originally designed for analog television media and each different geographical area where ads can be inserted at the service level requires a different service to be continually available for each of the different local ads. The services, however, will carry the same content nearly all of the time, and only differ when local ads are inserted for a brief period of time. A standard released by the Society of Cable Television Engineers (SCTE) for program substitution and advertisement insertion for MPEG-2 broadcast systems is ANSI/SCTE35 which details how splice points can be transmitted directly in an MPEG-2 transport stream. In particular, a content generator will specify points during their content playback at which advertisements may be inserted. These locations at which these points occur may be well known in advance, or they may be variable as in the case of sporting and other live events. SCTE35 is utilized for local ad insertion for MPEG-2 content.
While strides have been made in targeting advertisements to more granular levels of viewers, conventional systems do not provide effective systems that are able to insert advertisements at the set top box level in any semblance of real time. This inability presents certain drawbacks. For example, conventional systems do not attain the granularity of targeting users associated with a specific set top box. Thus, conventional models by definition send out ads to at least some users who do not fit the demographic. Moreover, today's advertisers depend on TV ratings from Nielsen Media Research and Taylor Nelson Sofres market research data. However, such data is only based on sample sets and surveys and may not be accurate. There is a pressing need for complete, relevant and accurate measurement data and feedback that will be valuable and rewarded by advertisers.
Further still, conventional systems do not monitor the specific number of times an ad is shown on a viewer-by-viewer basis, and are not well-equipped to control the specific number of times an ad is displayed. In particular, ads may be selected for local ad insertion, and it is only after the fact that the number of ad displays may be determined. That can have at least two side effects. First, an advertiser may specify that it wants its ad to run 1000 times, and will only pay for those 1000 ad inserts. Conventional television systems do not closely monitor how often the ad is run, and the ad may run more than 1000 times. The disadvantage here is that the additional broadcasts of the ad do not generate any revenue, and those inserts could have been filled with other ads that would have generated revenue. Second, it may happen that an ad is displayed too many times within a given period of time. This may result in so-called ad fatigue where the viewer develops a negative association with the ad, not because of the content, but because of how often it is being shown.
DVR recording and later playback of content also presents problems for advertisers. An ad may be for a particular event or otherwise timely when shown in a live broadcast of content. However, if that content is recorded for later playback, the ad may not be viewed until after the event or until after the ad has otherwise become stale. In this instance, the viewer no longer has any need to view the ad, and the advertiser no longer has any need to pay for the ad.